It's rare that I come across a problem where resource and speed constraints do not become an issue. Javascript and the DOM and latency has been an issue with cl

It's rare that I come across a problem where resource and speed constraints do not become an issue. Javascript and the DOM and latency has been an issue with client side web-apps. DB bottlenecks have been an issue on the serverside. Numerical performance and AI performance is an issue in CAD/CAM/CAE games and scientific analysis. In every scenario there have been algorithmic and software level improvements that have speed up the system by a factor of ten or more. Certainly it plateaus after a while, but one cannot hope to throw hardware at complicated problems and expect them to be solved without some serious elbow grease on the part of the programmer. Programs become increasingly more ambitious, and expand to fill the resources allocated to them: a kind of Hacker's Parkinson's law.